Impressed by Morsi

An old friend who has become, sadly, a near caricature of an Obama hating right-winger sent me an email Tuesday noting that Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first elected president had been invited to participate in the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York. He included a link to a Breitbart story which smeared the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist and jihadist organization (it is neither), and suggested that this news would produce such a backlash against Clinton, and by extension Obama, that it would “put Romney over the top.”

Of course it will do nothing of the sort, but it does focus more attention on Mohammed Morsi, who is proving rapidly to be one of the more pleasant surprises in world politics. Morsi is the Muslim Brotherhood candidate who won Egypt’s presidential election this summer. He has a doctorate in materials science from USC, earned during the 70s, and is able to say “Go Trojans” with the best of them. According to an interview with the New York Times, he dislikes the libertine aspects of American culture, including “naked restaurants” like Hooters–an attitude which may distinguish him from about half the American population.

Dr. Morsi was widely considered a political neophyte at the outset of the election campaign. But since being elected, he has shrewdly maneuvered to put to rest dangers of a military coup (and has disappointed many American neoconservatives) by appointing a new army chief of staff, General Sedki Sobhi, to replace the generals who toadied to Mubarak for a generation. Sobhi is likewise a product of American universities, in this case the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania.

Morsi’s Times interview was impressively fluent. Emphasizing the military’s subordination to the newly elected president, he said, switching to English: “The president of the Arab Republic of Egypt is the commander of the armed forces, full stop.” Nice touch, the full stop.

Both Morsi and his new army chief of staff (the latter, in an essay written seven years ago) stress the issue of Palestine. It is a neoconservative talking point that Arabs either do not have, or should not have, any real emotion about the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians–though of course Americans on the eastern seaboard managed to get worked up over the Alamo well before the age of modern communications.

Their perspective on Israel-Palestine is hardly radical: Morsi regularly mentions that the 1978 Camp David Accords also called for Palestinian autonomy (as well as securing peace between Egypt and Israel)–to which Israel has replied by moving a half million settlers into the West Bank. Egypt’s treaty obligations toward Israel are often taken as the beginning and end point of America’s interest in Egypt, but Israel had West Bank obligations under the treaty too–less clearly spelled out, which it evaded from the very beginning.

Speaking of the Cairo’s crowds, and their anger towards the US, Morsi notes, “Successive American administration essentially purchased with American taxpayer money the dislike, if not the hatred, of the peoples of the region”–both through its support of dictatorships and its one-sided backing of Israel. Americans may not want to hear that, but it’s a hard to dispute on a factual basis.

One interesting measure Morsi has taken since assuming office is to initiate diplomatic consultations on the Syrian crisis on a quartet basis with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Since the Mubarak era, Egypt has had no diplomatic relations with Iran. Clearly this middle power Mideast quartet has not succeeded, but it’s mere existence is a reminder that Iran is not as nearly so isolated as the bomb Iran crowd likes to pretend.

Per Breitbart, the American right may imagine that a democratically elected, culturally conservative, Egyptian Ph.D. with a 70 percent approval rating in the Arab world’s most important country is an kooky extremist, and yearn for his replacement by a pliant military dictator or a Mubarak type ready to be bought off with foreign bank accounts. But that reveals their own narrowness.

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15 Responses to Impressed by Morsi

Yes, what can be expected now—not without more than a little racialist and religious appeals to bigotry—is the tuning up of the Neo-con’s standard Willy Munznenberg-like propaganda organ with all its pipes here and there booming out how evil Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood are and blah blah blah.

After all, the only real solution—to Israel’s problem that is, as we certainly have no real interest at stake and indeed our huge interest is to not bleed ourselves dry and bankrupt pursuing same—is for the United States to essentially obtain and exert a throttlehold on all the major states of the Middle East so as to get them to throttle the emotions of their citizens so as to allow Israel to peacefully dispossess the Palestinians of the rest of their lands and then ethnically cleanse them of same as well.

What could be simpler? And isn’t that entire raison d’etre of the United States and its military-and-tax-paying-age citizenry anyway?

Three Egyptians accused of killing a man while he was walking with his fiancée were sentenced to 15 years in jail on Tuesday for forming an Islamist vigilante group to enforce their hard-line ideas, the state news agency MENA reported.

In a separate case, Egypt’s public prosecutor referred three Muslims to a criminal court after they were accused of insulting Christianity and desecrating a copy of the Bible.

Grounds for hope, but one also hopes there are many more of him. If Morsi turns out to be the combination of decency, strength and intelligence that he appears to be at present he will be almost unique. More typical are the Mubaraks, Netanyahus and Qaddafis.

@hetzer I think we have some idea of intention, both from what Wick wrote above, and from the more detailed exploration given here, http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/24/interviewing-egypts-islamist-president-answers-to-reader-questions/?ref=world&ref=middleeast by Kirpatrick and Erlanger, the Times’ correspondents–especially in response to the first question.
I think Morsi understands that his administration can’t possible succeed in conflict with the Copts, who form a substantial percentage of Egypt’s educated and professional classes. But a lot depends on events, of course, and I don’t doubt that a lot of people voted for Morsi who don’t have a trace of religious pluralism in their bones.

Good grief: is this an American publication? One can hardly believe one’s eyes reading an article that doesn’t completely demonize Morsi as a frothing-at-the-mouth jihadi intent on bombing the Capitol at the first possible opportunity.

There are a lot of problems connected with the fledgling Egyptian democracy, but it strikes me that the main one is the lack of a viable opposition party to the Brotherhood. It’s possible that some kind of quasi-secularist coalition may form around the remnants of the military government, once the most overt Mubarak elements are purged. Beyond that, it’s hard to see any other faction amassing enough influence to challenge the Brotherhood.

As for what we can do, the best thing is to accept that actual democracies are going to reflect the people voting (that whole you-get-the-government-the-electorate-deserves thing). And because democratic governments must be responsive to the electorate, that means Egypt will be less responsive to us. She’ll do things we don’t like (like talking to Iran). And that’s as it should be.

In other words, we need to let go. But like a junkie addicted to power, too many Americans feel the need for control.

“I sometimes have to explain to Egyptians that The New York Times is not owned or controlled by the United States government.” (From the question and answer link above.) Would it matter if it was? This is laughable. As is the idea that Morsi presents some bright new future. Expect him to make the cover of TIME any day now.

Right. Morsi’s plan to reach out to Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia is brilliant. To me, this aspect of the Arab Spring (Turkey as honorary member!) has the chance to fulfill the long put-off dream of self-determination after independence: for the entire area to determine its fate, as well as individual states. The more that is resolved by Arab and ME nations, the less room for Western meddling.

I find it strange that the Republicans tend to be more afraid of the Brotherhood than Democrats, given that the Brotherhood is a basically conservative, upper-class group with a dash of Free Masonry-like secrecy and revolutionary ideals. The ones we should be scared of are the hardcore Salafists who will come to power if the Brotherhood fails.

Morsi should heal the breach between Egypt and Iran thoroughly if he wants to temper
Ameri-Israeli imperialism in his region.
One thing he could do is attack the CIA for helping jihadists destroy Syria just now, and send signals he considers Russia’s influence in the region at large more helpful than that of the United States just now.

Morsi caught my attention as soon as he wrested control which the Egyptian military tried to take away from his office just days before handing control over to him. His actions since then have also been noteworthy. He’s a man to keep an eye on, though it remains to be seen whether his actions will prove enough to get Egypt’s economy functional again, or fight the regional prevailing winds of sectarian strife.